Last week, Forbes released its list of 30 people under 30 in art and style, all of them hot young taste-shapers "creating and designing the future of fashion and the arts." Among the select — snug at the top in the upper left-hand corner — is a 20-year-old fashion designer from Albany.

"Nigerian immigrant Taofeek Abijako started his luxe men's streetwear brand when he was a teenager at Albany High School," the spread declares, unspooling his origin story. "To fund his first capsule collection, he painted designs on $45 Vans sneakers and sold them for $200."

On the horn Tuesday afternoon, Abijako called the Forbes imprimatur "cool" and "very exciting," expressing hope that other young designers will take his cue and follow their muse: "Just do you, and eventually validation comes along the way."

He sees it, too, as yet more validation that immigrants have something to give. "This country was built on the backs of immigrants," said Abijako, the youngest designer ever to show at New York Men's Fashion Week. "There's this long history of immigrants adding value to American society ... It's just always been that way."

He is, in fact, just one in a recent trio of fresh creative visionaries with Albany connections and diverse voices to bubble up into national cultural prominence. A few weeks ago, the writer Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah — a UAlbany graduate and former Times Union arts intern — blasted onto the literary scene with rave reviews of "Friday Black," his debut collection of rivetingly dark short stories satirizing race and consumerism in American life. Earlier this year, actor-rapper-comedian-YouTube star Awkwafina — also a UAlbany graduate and former Times Union arts intern — launched into the mainstream pop-cultural psyche with the films "Ocean's Eight" and "Crazy Rich Asians."

As we say in journalism, three is a trend. And right now, with a caravan of Central American refugees inspiring xenophobic talk in the highest reaches of government, the work of all three embodies the character of a nation made from the spirit and elbow grease of newcomers.

Abijako arrived in the States with his family in 2010. Adjei-Brenyah is a son of Ghanaian immigrants. Awkwafina's late mother was a South Korean immigrant; her father is Chinese-American.

Abijako's vibrantly colored line of urban streetwear — Head of State, which is now being carried in the United States, Canada and Japan through the Japanese chain United Arrows — speaks to the cultural influences of post-colonial Africa. Awkwafina's furiously vulgar, furiously funny rap songs speak to the role of women and Asian-Americans in pop culture: "Yo, and I bring that yellow to the rap game." And Adjei-Brenyah's startlingly brutal, startlingly human stories speak to the core of systemic racism: In one, white suburbanites pretend to slay black "intruders" at an amusement park staffed with people of color.

Appearing at the New York State Writers Institute on Oct. 30, Adjei-Brenyah talked about growing up with immigrant parents and the pressure to excel; he finally learned how to make them happy, he joked, when he was interviewed by The New York Times. Added Abijako: "It's never enough. It's never enough — trust me," he said. His parents "just don't believe the sky's a limit. There's no limit whatsoever."

The need to achieve "was instilled in me from a young age," Abijako said. His parents never told him to go off, work hard and pursue the American dream. All that was simply expected of him. "It wasn't, 'Oh, I'm American, I have to do this, I have to do that.' It was just subconscious. It was fulfilling my potential."

In July, Teen Vogue ran a story hailing his designs, vision and "blueprint for how young designers can bypass the fashion industry's hierarchy" by pursuing their own work. "Making Fashion Week great again," proclaimed the subhead, and while he grimaces at the rush to anoint him — "It was like, 'Oh, my God, this is a lot of pressure!'" — he appreciates the unspoken subtext. In the era of Make America Great Again, an immigrant kid is attributed with doing exactly that for the New York fashion scene. "That's so funny. That's so funny," he said. "There's so much, like, irony."

But Abijako, for one, sees a potential upside to all the negativity: It's inspired waves of others to focus on the positive, affirm the contributions of new Americans and reassert their own immigrant roots.

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Contact Amy Biancolli at 518-454-5439 or abiancolli@timesunion.com or visit the arts blog at http://blog.timesunion.com/localarts

"I think the more we keep shining the light on situations like that, the more the negativity is overlooked. If we can shine at least 1 percent of that attention to the negative onto the positive side of things," he said, "I just think that we, as a society, will see progress."